‘New spaces really rev my brain up’, says Robert Binet, the Canadian choreographer bringing his immersive ballet The Dreamers Ever Leave You to Printworks, London, this week. ‘It’s a huge and really cool space. You really feel the history of the printing press – you can see the tracks the newspapers used to fly through and all the loading bays for the trucks. It’s got this amazing historical texture but it’s also a blank canvas – there’s something stunning about wide open spaces, in the natural world especially, but also man-made ones like this’.

Binet’s inspiration for the ballet, which was first performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2016, was the paintings of Canadian artist Lawren Harris. Harris’s landscape paintings reduce experiences of the natural world – especially his sparse, arctic scenes – to their core elements, highlighting the spiritual power and magnitude of the landscapes.

‘Harris is an artist I’ve always loved’, says Binet. ‘He was painting these images before we had much photography or film, so he kind of created Canada’s image of the North. I wanted to humanize the energy Harris captures and try to make it more accessible – I think ideas are always more relatable when they are explored through humanity’.

The piece is performed to new music by Canadian composer and pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, who set two world records in 1985 as the fastest piano player in the world – he can play more than 19 notes per second on each hand. His technique of ‘continuous music’ (a combination of classical and minimalist piano styles) with its rich, layered and cascading texture, conjures a mystical atmosphere of what the Canada Globe and Mail in 2016 described as ‘a powerful feeling of incomprehensible forces, of spiritual beauty and underlying risk’.

‘I was thrilled when Lubomyr agreed to make new music for this ballet’, says Binet. ‘He’s created about 14 movements but for each movement there’s a theme that he improvizes. The dancers know the themes really well but the order of the movements will often change or will be played a little differently. I’ve asked the dancers to let the changing music and light infuse their bodies so their performances vary every time too.’

The audience also have the power to control their experience of the performance by moving around the venue's large open space. As Binet explains, this certainly has its advantages and opportunities for innovation: ‘You have to approach every element afresh, which makes it more conducive to creativity,’ he says. ‘Sometimes it’s easier than more traditional venues because, while the choreography needs to look good from every angle, it doesn’t need to look its best from just one angle.

‘When you’re creating for a theatre the audience shows up, sits down and we lift the curtain. With this piece we’ve had to take a more holistic approach: I’m choreographing the audience’s experience as much as the dancers. I’ve worked hard to ensure the focus pulls from one side of the room to the other; in Toronto, where it was first performed, some people would scurry around after their favourite dancer while others would stand in the back corner and take it in from a distance. I hope giving people a flexible experience like this raises the odds of them connecting with ballet and dance.’

Crystal Pite is a new choreographer to The Royal Ballet, but a familiar name to dance lovers in both North America and Europe. Working with companies from her own Kidd Pivot to Paris Opera Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater, her creations often combine elements of classical ballet with a powerful sense of drama. Here are six pieces which show why Pite is one of the most esteemed choreographers working today:

The Seasons' Canon

A number of Pite’s works have used large groups of dancers. The Seasons’ Canon, created recently for Paris Opera Ballet, is one such work, in which Max Richter’s recomposed version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons underpins a rippling mass which becomes a subtle evocation of the power and beauty of nature.

Polaris

Polaris caused a sensation when it was first performed at Sadler’s Wells in 2014. It is set to Thomas Adès’s extraordinary ‘voyage for orchestra’ of the same name, and features more than sixty dancers dressed in black, running, scuttling and quivering across the stage, creating a universe that is epic, strange and hypnotic.

The Tempest Replica

An unexpected link between Pite and Adès is their fascination with The Tempest: they have both created adaptations of Shakespeare’s play, Adès for The Royal Opera in 2004 and Pite for Kidd Pivot in 2011. But The Tempest Replica goes further than providing the narrative of the play: after a first section introduces the play’s characters and plot, in the second half a section of pure dance puts the spotlight on the characters’ relationships.

Flight Pattern

For her debut Royal Ballet work, Pite is collaborating once again with several of her regular designers: set designer Jay Gower Taylor, costume designer Nancy Bryant and lighting designer Tom Visser, all of whom worked on several of the works mentioned above. But the subject matter is very different: Flight Pattern addresses one of today’s greatest humanitarian questions, set to the first movement of Henryk Górecki’s powerful ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’.

The mixed programme is staged with generous philanthropic support from Ian and Tina Taylor and The Taylor Family Foundation, with After the Rain given generous philanthropic support from Kenneth and Susan Green and Flight Pattern generous philanthropic support from Richard and Delia Baker and Sue Butcher.

This year, the stream was available to watch via Facebook Live and was the longest broadcast ever shown on the platform.

The day saw each company give insights into daily life for their dancers, featuring rehearsals, interviews and the ever-popular morning ballet class. This year's relay was presented by Gethin Jones and Darcey Bussell. The day's schedule ran as follows:

11:00am: Live class with The Royal Ballet

12:30pm: The Royal Ballet rehearses Anastasia

1:00pm: The Royal Ballet rehearses La Fille mal gardée

1:30pm: The Royal Ballet rehearses The Sleeping Beauty

1:50pm: The Royal Ballet rehearses the new Charlotte Edmonds ballet

2:15pm: Members of The Royal Ballet School rehearse

2:45pm: The Royal Ballet rehearses Anastasia

Last year's World Ballet Day reached an audience of more than 2 million, both live and on-demand. #WorldBalletDay trended on Twitter in the UK for more than two hours and reached more than 167 million users worldwide. The first WBD took place in 2014 and was inspired by Royal Ballet Live in 2012.

Subscribe to the Royal Opera House YouTube channel to be notified when we upload further highlights from World Ballet Day:

]]>http://www.roh.org.uk/news/world-ballet-day-returns-on-4-october-2016/feed15World Ballet Day to show live action from inside five of the world’s leading ballet companieshttp://www.roh.org.uk/news/world-ballet-day-to-show-live-action-from-inside-five-of-the-worlds-leading-ballet-companies
http://www.roh.org.uk/news/world-ballet-day-to-show-live-action-from-inside-five-of-the-worlds-leading-ballet-companies#commentsMon, 08 Sep 2014 22:00:39 +0000Lottie Butlerhttp://www.roh.org.uk/?p=33221

In a global first, World Ballet Day will show live, behind-the-scenes action from the rehearsal studios of five world-class ballet companies on 1 October 2014.

Viewers can watch online right here at www.roh.org.uk/worldballetday, and the stream will subsequently be repeated on YouTube to allow viewers from around the globe to catch up on anything they missed. Edited highlights will be made available after the event.

World Ballet Day follows Royal Ballet Live, a nine-hour live stream which took place in March 2012, attracting some 200,000 views of the live stream and repeat broadcast and 2.5 million views of YouTube Royal Ballet Live material.

Your free digital guide to World Ballet Day is available here - simply type in the promo code: worldballet14 to claim your free guide (usual price £2.99). Please note that the promo code is case sensitive.

Join us on Twitter and Facebook for updates on what will happen on the day.

A service of thanksgiving for the life of former Royal Ballet dancer Alexander Grant is to be held at noon on Friday April 27. All are welcome at the service at St Paul's Church, Covent Garden.

Alexander Grant was born in 1925 in Wellington, New Zealand. In 1946 he moved to the United Kingdom where he took a place at the Sadler's Wells Ballet School. He subsequently became a member of the Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet before subsequently transferring to what became The Royal Ballet. His career was particularly associated with the ballets of Frederick Ashton including La Fille mal gardée, currently onstage at The Royal Opera House. On hearing of Alexander's death, Director of The Royal Ballet, Monica Mason announced that the revival of this particular ballet will be dedicated to the dancer's memory. Alexander left the company in 1976 to become Artistic Director at the National Ballet of Canada, continuing to dance all the while. He died in September 2011 aged 86.

View a gallery of photos taken over Alexander's career with The Royal Ballet: